In conjunction with the American Repertory Theater’s upcoming run of the musical “Gatsby” (which opens Thursday), The Brattle Theatre hosts a series titled “Fitzgerald and the Jazz Age,” collecting 10 films made and/or set around the time of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s era-defining novel.
The series opens with the feature film debut of one of the most enduring actors and directors of the 1920s: Charlie Chaplin’s 1921 “The Kid,” which screens Friday and Sunday. “The Kid” represents a major turning point in Chaplin’s career for reasons far beyond its length. The story, in which Chaplin’s Little Tramp becomes a father figure to a young orphan, is as moving as it is funny, and its climactic scenes still bring a lump to the throat nearly a century after its release. Make no mistake, though: It is funny, with Chaplin’s effortless physical comedy matched beat-for-beat by his young co-star, Jackie Coogan. (Though perhaps best remembered today as Uncle Fester on TV’s “The Addams Family,” Coogan was one of Hollywood’s first child stars, and the California Child Actor’s Bill, which governs the use of young actors in the movie industry to this day, is known informally as the “Coogan Act.”) Though he has influenced thousands of comic actors across several generations and counting, no one could do what Chaplin did quite like Chaplin.
The series continues with an eclectic array of titles, ranging from King Vidor’s 1925 silent war epic “The Big Parade” (which screens Tuesday) to Damien Chazelle’s outrageous (and, in this writer’s opinion, underrated) 2022 Hollywood expose “Babylon” (Saturday, in a double feature with Elia Kazan’s 1976 “The Last Tycoon”) to “Three Comrades,” the only screenplay completed by Fitzgerald himself during his ill-fated tenure at MGM (Saturday as well).
I would like to draw particular attention to perhaps the rarest selection of the series: Joan Micklin Silver’s “Bernice Bobs her Hair,” which screens from an original 16 mm print on Sunday. Adapted from a Fitzgerald short story and produced for PBS in 1976 – it clocks in at under an hour – “Bernice” concerns a young society girl (Veronica Cartwright) who pityingly teaches her shy cousin (the great Shelley Duvall) how to attract male attention, only to grow jealous as she becomes upstaged by her pupil. “Bernice” is filled with signifiers of the roaring ’20s, from boaters and cloches to some incredible old cars, but it is perhaps more interesting as an artifact of the 1970s. Silver was one of the few major female directors to come out of the ’70s Hollywood New Wave, and she fills her cast with some of the decade’s most distinctive faces, including Cartwright, Dennis Christopher and Bud Cort of “Harold and Maude” (with his enormous eyes and nervous demeanor, it’s a wonder more directors didn’t pair Cort with Duvall). But this is Duvall’s show through and through; few actors of any era can rival the ethereal presence of Duvall at her peak, and every second she’s on screen is transfixing. “Bernice” is almost never screened, and is a must for anyone interested in any of the talent involved.
The Somerville Theatre brings back its yearly summertime “Midnight Specials” series, and this Saturday’s offering is a doozy. Released to little American fanfare in 1994, Italian director Michele Soavi’s “Cemetery Man” is one of the most unclassifiable horror movies of the decade. Francesco Dellamorte (played by a pre-stardom Rupert Everett) is a gravedigger with a problem: The bodies he inters never seem to stay dead. Rather than fill out the mountain of paperwork that would come with informing the families or his bosses, Dellamore has taken to simply re-killing and re-burying them without breaking a sweat. His life is complicated, however, when he falls for a beautiful widow (Finnish supermodel Anna Falchi) who may or may not be of the dead herself. “Cemetery Man” is very funny – sometimes outrageously so, sometimes with bone-dry deadpan – but it’s more than your typical zom-com. Soavi previously worked under Dario Argento and Terry Gilliam, and “Cemetery Man” echoes the filmmakers’ jaw-dropping visuals. It also harbors a surprisingly wistful existential streak, and the chemistry between Everett and Falchi is smoldering. If you can only see one sexy art house zombie splatter-comedy this weekend, make it “Cemetery Man.”
The Brattle kicks off its annual “Reunion Week” on Wednesday, showcasing films celebrating their 25th, 50th or 75th anniversaries. We’ll cover this series in more depth next week, but I would be remiss if I didn’t showcase the series’ opening selection: Mel Brooks’ “Young Frankenstein,” which turns 50 this year. You probably don’t need me to tell you that “Young Frankenstein” is one of the funniest movies ever made – Brooks, star Gene Wilder and the rest of the cast are at their absolute comic peaks – but I don’t think it gets its due as one of the best-looking studio comedies in movie history. Brooks and cinematographer Gerald Hirschfeld capture the look and feel of the Universal monster movies of the 1930s on a nearly subliminal level; watching from today’s vantage, it’s easy to lose track of the fact that it looks and moves nothing like a movie from 1974 and everything like a product of the early talkie age. The crisp black and white pops off the screen, and the matte paintings and production design (including many props lifted from the set of the original film) are nothing short of gorgeous. None of this would matter, of course, if the film weren’t hysterically funny (I still giggle thinking of Wilder’s delivery of “seda-give?!?”), but the care Brooks and his team put into the film cemented its place as a comedy for the ages.
This week marks the ninth annual Global Cinema Film Festival of Boston, which runs Friday and Saturday at Arlington’s Capitol Cinema, and online through Tuesday. Founded by Sierra Leonean filmmaker Raouf J. Jacob, it is unique among local festivals, focusing exclusively on internationally produced documentaries of an activist bent. This year, the fest runs on a hybrid model, with five features screening in person at the Capitol and the rest available digitally. The in-person selections represent the festival’s broad scope in terms of topic and geography.
Friday sees Alisa Kovalenko’s “We Will Not Fade Away,” about a band of Ukrainian teenagers who dream of a bright future through an uncertain present, and “Radici,” in which director Clenét Verdi-Rose and his mother trace the history of Saint Anthony’s Feast from the Italian village of Montefalcione to Boston’s North End. Saturday brings Belgian filmmaker Pieter Van Eecke’s “Planet B,” about a pair of teens embarking on a career of climate change activism; “Murky Waters,” about the legal nightmare surrounding a boat full of refugees rescued off the coast of Greece; and Daniel McCabe’s “Grasshopper Republic,” which follows a team of Ugandan grasshopper trappers over the course of three seasons. For those planning their festival itinerary, please note that “Radici” and “Grasshopper” will be available digitally (along with six additional titles) through Tuesday, while the rest will screen exclusively at the Capitol.
Oscar Goff is a writer and film critic based in Somerville. He is film editor and senior critic for the Boston Hassle and his work has appeared in the monthly Boston Compass newspaper and publications such as WBUR’s The ARTery and iHeartNoise. He is a member of the Boston Society of Film Critics, the Boston Online Film Critics Association, and the Online Film Critics Society.
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